himself. what they did to his reputation with the washington post is a disgrace. these reporters wrote this book. they said i want a mode with alligators, snakes, electrified fences so people get electrocuted if they touch the fence, and spikes on top. never said it, never thought of it. i put out something on social media today. i set i am tough on the border but not that tough. it was a lie. you asked the question. it was a total lie. it was corrupt reporting. i don't even use fake anymore. i called the fake news corrupt news because fake is not tough enough. i am the one that came up with the term. i think i will switch it to corrupt news. the media in this country -- not everybody. we have some great journalists, but much of it is corrupt. you have corrupt media in this country. it truly is the enemy of the people. thank you very much.

[reporters shouting questions] >> we continued the conversation on impeachment in the whistleblower complaint against president trump. the complaint against donald trump. paul worsens wide -- paul the senior counsel during the whitewater investigation. .ou worked for ken starr do you see any legal similarities between that investigation and the investigation against president trump? as it is being conducted by the intelligence committee? a differentnk it is kettle of fish that present its own level of issues. at the highest level, the legal question of what constitutes a high crime and misdemeanor and what are congress' investigative authorities, that does not change. but there is a significant difference in the nature of two levels ats on

least. the first is that the congress in the clinton investigation really did not conduct any independent investigation of its own. it relied almost exclusively on the input of the independent counsel, ken starr. that was not necessarily inappropriate. he had spent over a year investigating the lewin ski y matter. the lewinsk by contrast, there has not been a real outside investigation at least of the trump-ukraine allegations, so that gives congress a real job to do in uncovering what they think might or might not turn out to be impeachable. host: let me ask about the whistleblower himself. a piece in "the atlantic ran over the weekend -- "the atlantic" ran over the weekend.

small details that help to confirm his credibility. explain that. well, in evaluating a witness, you want to understand other or not what they are telling you it is true, whether or not they are biased, whether their recollection is good. one of the best ways in my experience of doing that is for the witness to tell you something you do not know, and no external way of knowing, and then go out and confirm it. that is like when the murderer suspect tells you i was wearing blue shoes at the time and nobody has seen the video that shows lou shoes. case, whenewinsky's she said she was in the white house with president clinton and their encounter was interrupted when he took a phone call from somebody. she could not remember his name exactly, but she said it was

something like -- then we got the records of the white house phone calls, and at the moment she said she was there, the president had taken a call from a man named alfonso fanjul. democratic donor, a sugar manufacturer in florida. she could not reasonably have known other than the fact that she was there, and that proved her information was valid. whistleblower,he his complaint described the nature of the president's call with the president of ukraine, including many of the details and describe the fact that the memorandum of the conversation had been moved from the regular white house server to a code word protected server, and he described those things before they became publicly known. again, just like the lewinsk

it in advance of it becoming public, demonstrating that he had inside knowledge. host: he also in that complaint offered a statement of information that he is reporting secondhand, or he is not the original source of that information. do you find that credible? guest: most of our lives are built on secondhand information. if i tell you that the nets won nats wont -- that the in theght and the guy stands told me he had a single, that tells you that the single was hit last night. we accept that. we do not accept it in courts of law because a defendant is entitled to confront his accuser when he is charged with a crime. but we do accept it to start an investigation, to issue a search warrant, to develop a grounds for opening an impeachment

inquiry. so the idea that the secondhand information is somehow not to be trusted is just a false construct. host: paul

thes clear that where intelligence community itself to be responsible for listening into the human occasions of a u.s. citizen like hunter biden, that would be a violation of the prohibition against intelligence collection against the was

person -- a u.s. person. that the president cannot be directly, he cannot ask a foreign government to do and directly. host: there is another foreign leader coming in. the president called boris johnson to help discredit the molar inquiry -- mueller inquiry. he asked for help to discredit the investigation between russia and the campaign. guest: and australia. when the president asked attorney general barr, he said i hope barr will look at the ukraine and the u.k. and australia. surprisingrribly that he would call the leaders of those nations to get them to as ain what he perceives legitimate inquiry into the false charges against him. the real ground of the problem

is there is not much ground for the investigation. caller: in past years the president seen as a puppet. what we have learned with trump is the president has a lot of doj, irs, ppa.he all the little --epa. all the different little things he gets to a point. when the dni get a report saying the whistleblower did this, why did he take that report to the white house counsel? guest: those are great questions. you point out something the incidents have truly demonstrated.

the framers thought of congress as a strong and vibrant check on executive authority. back when they were writing of the constitution, james madison was quite confident and he assured everybody not to worry. we would never have a bad man as president. if we did, congress would assuredly use its impeachment authority and its oversight authority to check his power. the problem is congress seems to have stepped back from its investigative authority for a number of years. the president has figured out in fact its enforcement authority really is a bit of a paper tiger. they don't have the power of arrest. they have to go to court together documents. they are not as strong as medicine thought they were, at least not today -- madison thought they were, at least not today. for an was looking

opinion about executive privilege. i don't find that persuasive but he was in a really difficult position. a subordinate with an urgent concern relating to his boss. i sort of feel for him a little bit. he is not even the full-time dni. he is the acting director of national intelligence. as he said, he is still using his gps to figure out where the office is. he is that new. mcguire needs a bit of a break in this one. host: james in olympia, washington. caller: i'm concerned this is a set up by democrats to distract from criminal activities which are about to be exposed by a.g. the hillaryng clinton paying for the steele

dossier. i am questioning this whole thing. i'm an independent voter. i voted for obama. host: the origins of the mueller investigation. do you know anything about that? guest: i know it has been in the public. advisor saysr dhs the theory had been completely debunked. i know it was fully laid out in the mueller report. there was a nice one nation for the steele dossier. i know the steele dossier played almost no role in the opening of the investigation of russian influence because that began before the dossier was created. i understand the caller's concerns. the echo chamber of news that keeps yelling this fact into the thosphere echoes in her

world. there seems to be almost no credible evidence that is the case. host: let me ask you about ken starr. he says trump showed poor judgment but that is not a crime. he was on fox news last week and said this. i wanted to give you a chance to hear that. [video] >> impeachment is doomed to fail given what we know. obviously the facts are flowing in. in the history of the country presidential efforts to impeach do not work. guess what? of the 62 impeachment , eight have resulted in convictions. this is not going to result in a conviction. why are we on the impeachment train? we should be on the oversight train and quit calling it impeachment, especially since

there is something quite profoundly wrong under our constitution to call it impeachment that we are on a formal impeachment inquiry. no, with all due respect, until the house votes as a body to conduct an impeachment inquiry or investigation there is simply action by committees sanctioned by the speaker. it sounds like a structural point but we live by structure and our constitutional republic. what they are doing now is leaving it to have a dozen committees to get the ball rolling. what would change doing it the way you said? formale would be a action resulting by the house -- a court of appeals for the supreme court notices that the action of the people's house, not of the speaker saying i

hereby smile and with these differoversight committees are doing. he would also have the practical effect of centralizing the inquiry as opposed to this vulcanized approach that seems to be getting underway in the house judiciary committee as we saw in the clinton inquiry years ago. host: that is former whitewater counsel can start -- can star -- ken starr. guest: it is difficult for me because ken is an old friend. i think he was deeply unfairly maligned by president clinton at the time. i continue to believe that the actions he took and i took while working with him in investigating president clinton were proper and appropriate. that having been said, most of what he just said is unfortunately not really persuasive and in some cases wrong. the house rules do not require a

vote of impeachment. his structural point is an error. the house has in fact proceeded impeachmentte of against many of the judges that have been impeached. he is correct there have been 63 impeachments and only eight convictions. that's because most of the judges and others who get impeached resign rather than face the trial in the senate. so that is a misleading statistic, albeit a true one. notably, if the standard is that there should not -- you should not proceed with an inquiry unless you were certain there will be a conviction, that calls into question why he and i recommended impeachment in the first place under bill clinton. there was almost no likelihood they would be a conviction. quite to the contrary. ishink impeachment by itself

a useful function by putting on the record the people's houses view with the president's conduct and the pluses and minuses of conviction in the end, which i don't think 's acquittal is a foregone conclusion where he would be impeached. it depends very much on what is shown ahead of time. that is useful. baum wrote a piece in the atlantic about how the process of impeachment is itself a performance of american values on the public sphere. host: jeff in silver spring, maryland.

caller: my original question was that if you can save of the criteria is for high crimes and misdemeanors, my understanding is it is different than committing a crime. whether that is well-established and whether you were willing to say whether you think based on the evidence now if what he has done could be considered that. another quick question is whether giuliani and trump will be able to hide under attorney-claim privilege. thank you very much. guest: those are great questions. they are completely different questions so i will take them in order. high crimes and misdemeanors is a standard the u.s. constitution derives from british practice. it goes back a couple of hundred years. if you want to dive into it, a professor just wrote a long,

250 to 300 facebook on the topic that will tell you everything -- page book on the topic that will tell you every thing. there are some crimes that are not impeachable. think of drunk driving. nobody would take a prident not for doing that. there are crimes that are clearly impeachable like obstruction of justice and perjury. then there are acts that are not crimes but also impeachable offenses. those take on a more abusive authority, political character to it. for example, the example that george mason, our founder cited during the debates on the constitution. a president who misused his pardoning power to pardon all his friends and protect himself from criminal prosecution. nobody would say issuing the pardon was a crime, but mason's view was it was abusive authority and thus a high crime or misdemeanor. i would say gerald ford was quoted as saying a high crime or

misdemeanor is whatever a majority of the house of representatives says it is, which in practice is actually the right thing, but in theory is probably a little too strong. ney-on theie pvige issue and rudy giuliani, there are several aspects. ishat giuliani said on tv when he went to the ukraine he wasn't acting as a lawyer. he was acting as an advocate for the president's policies. aneven begin to consider attorney-client privilege it is not just that you are talking to an attorney. i'm an attorney right now but our discussion here is not under the attorney-client privilege because i'm not here as your attorney. that is the first thing. the second piece is the privilege i protect the confidential communications from your client. if bill were my client and he told me a secret, i could not be forced to disclose it outside.

it is not a privilege if i interact with the ukrainian foreig national and tell him what the president said or tell him i'mestiting hunter biden or anything like that. the third piece of this which is appropriate is if the advice from your client is to help the client commit a crime in the future, there is something called- it eviscerates the attorney-client privileged. you can't use an attorney's advice to commit a crime. on at least three grounds it is aite unlikely giuliani has claim. he is going to assert it. the house will have to go to court to try to get him to testify, and unless the courts expedite it, giuliani will drag out his refusal to a claim. appear for weeks, months, once again demonstrating congress'

enforcement authority has become toothless. host: kurt on the independent line. good morning. caller: good morning. -- adamt this with schiff, he's in charge of this impeachment there really isn't in impeachment yet. he makes a parody. is this serious? you talk about echo chambers. i would guess your echo chamber is different than mine. if his echoes go across the media and people believe what he said, which was not truthful at all? you were counsel to what president? thank you. host: are you talking about our guest? guest: i was not counsel to a

president. i was part of the independent counsel that investigated bill clinton at the direction of the special division of the u.s. court of appeals under the independent counsel law which is no longer law in the united states. host: how long did you serve as a whitewater counsel? before monica, lewinsky was a dream in people's eyes. i left the office in 2000. i continued outside as a consultant to help write the final reports. the last work i did was probably in 2001 or 2002. host: were you called to testify? guest: no, the only witness who testified for the counsel's office was ken starr. host: joe on the republican line.

you.n't hear it is tough to hear you on the cell phone. caller: [indiscernible] new orleans, derek on the democrats line. caller: hi. as it relates to the impeachment inquiry, i'm wondering if you think the senate will actually act on their part of impeachment if the house does make a decision or whatever they do find? right now there is a lot of discussion about that. i wonder if you think the senate will actually take that step if it comes to it. guest: that's a good question. there has been speculation the senate would ignore the impeachment. the majority leader mcconnell spoke to that a couple of days ago and he said very clearly he would follow the rules and bring the impeachment up before the senate. it is not a constitutional requirement, but there is a senate rules requirement that

must happen. he then said, and this is where your point becomes a little more salient. how long we stay on the matter, how long we spend discussing it, that's a different question. he would bring it up but he may very well try and spend only a little bit of time and deal with it summarily. the question going forward for the senate is going to be whether or not he has the votes to actually short-circuit the impeachment inquiry once it started. that means asking questions like, will moderate republicans like susan collins vote to short-circuit the impeachment inquiry? theypeople who have said are troubled like ben sasse and mitt romney do that? will cory gardner, who is facing a difficult race, agree? this is a total guess. i don't do politics professionally but i guess they will not feel that comfortable

too short of a-- process. when andrew johnson was impeached they spent two months on the trial. we will not get two months. but we will not get two hours either. host: it is possible the senate could choose to block it or table it or not take it up? guest: once mcconnell brings it up on the floor his first motion could be to summarily dispose of it and move on to the next bit of business. that, its 51 votes for imagine he can achieve that by overruling and changing the rules as they did with judges in the nuclear option a couple of years ago. that has got a raw sense to it. i think he is going to be making a much more nuanced political judgment on the time comes based on whatever evidence that comes

forward between now and then. host: 15 more minutes with our guest. the rosensweig served on whitewater investigation. for republicans. (202) 748-8000 free democrats. independents, (202) 748-8002. you are the senior fellow at the r street institute. newt: it's a relatively think tank in washington, d.c. we call yourselves a center-right think tank. but with a practical twist. our tagline is free markets, real solutions. we like marcus to work but we want them to have real solutions about how to make them work that are. host: secretary of state pompeo confirming reports he was on the call between president trump the ukrainian president. the secretary of state is in italy at a news conference this

morning. he was asked why he was preventing some of the depositions of state department employees. here is his response. [video] >> the phone call was in the context -- i had to secretary of state for about a year and a half. i know precisely what the american policy is with respect to ukraine. it has been remarkably consistent. we will continue to try to drive those set of outcomes. it is what our team, including ambassador volker refocused on. taking down the threat that russia poses in ukraine. it isit was about helping the andinians to get graft out corruption out of their government, and to help this new government in ukraine build a successful, thriving economy. it is what state department officials i've had the privilege to lead have been engaged in and what we will continue to do,

even while all this noise is going on. host: what do you think of the secretary's legal standing in terms of this issue? guest: his letter to congress said he would not let people appear because congress was bullying them. witnesses who are demanded to testify in front of congress and the grand jury's. -- juries. branch has a way of stopping congressional inquiries. his assertion of executive privilege. he did not do that. he just said i don't want to play. 'gain,'congress '-- congress authority is weak. stop volker in the

former ambassador who are agreeing to appear anyway and he can't stop them. host: robert on the democrats line. thank you for waiting. is what if question donald trump is the whistleblower? guy toady has a fall where he was getting cold feet on the election. well, that's an interesting theory. i don't know who the fall guy would be. host: it does seem there is an actual person. news reports indicate whistleblower was perhaps a cia employee. guest: i think it is quite clearly a real person. that person has sought anonymity. i would want to respect it. until he decides to -- he or she decides to forgo it. guest: how does the committee ensure privacy where the whistleblower does not want to

be publicly identified? guest: it is going to be very hard. congress can take evidence in camera, behind closed doors. they can limit the number of people who are exposed to the witness's identity. most if not all congressmen are going to know. we live in washington. when congress knows a fact, the whole world knows the fact sometime later. host: laura from south tampa, florida. caller: i just want to make a statement and then i will ask your guests a question. my statement is as an independent i recognize the two-party system, the duopoly created is what is adversely affecting our country. pittingessentially parties against one another. if we could come together as a

people on greed and corruption, eradicating that, i think that is what we need to do as americans. i voted for trump. here is my question for your guest. know,and foremost, you biden is on record for withholding u.s. aid to ukraine a prosecutoret fired he was investigating his son. ukrainians investigated this. let's have a legitimate ukrainian government conducting the investigation. let's conduct one here in the u.s. if you want to go forward with investigating trump, by all means go for it. but let's investigate biden as well because there is a monetary gain there. say -- know how you can the narrative you put forward is so false in its premise and so

dangerous to this country because you frame it in a way where it is like we are digging up dirt on biden but we need to impeach trump because he broke the law. he violated the constitution. that is the narrative you put forth. they are all dirty. they are all corrupt. let's go after them regardless of what party they are affiliated with. parties, theon founders thought they would not be political parties. they were wrong and they were wrong within 10 years of the framing of the constitution. the first parties arose. the federalist and the democratic republicans. on the biden issue, i regret to say the viewer is just factually wrong. it is the case that then vice president biden went to withhold usaid, but the threat was because the prosecutors were

inadequately investigating corruption, not because they were doing too much. that particular prosecutor was not investigating hunter biden's company. that was the problem. the reality is the vice president was trying to do more to root out corruption, not less. i know that is an uncomfortable thatand listening to thanks if you were probably unhappy, but it's the truth. more to the point, and just to be clear about it, even if all that were true, it would be art of the inappropriate for the president to withhold military aid to the crane to get them -- ukrainians to get them to open up an investigation into his political opponent, irrespective of heavy get done some thing wrong. host: a text from randy says --